São Paulo – The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) disclosed on Thursday (06), in Rome, its annual report. In study The State of Food and Agriculture 2012 (SOFA), the institution defends that producers be in the centre of investment turned to agriculture, and supports prioritising the sectors that may guarantee growth and return to farmers.
According to the organisation’s study, there are approximately one billion farmers worldwide, managing large and small properties. The farmers in poor and developing nations invest over US$ 170 billion a year, approximately US$ 150 per farmer, according to the FAO. To the institution, that is equivalent to triple the investment made in other sectors, four times more than the contributions of the public sector and over 50 times what these countries offer in assistance.
The study says that the countries that invested most in agricultural products were also those with the greatest success in hunger alleviation and in reaching the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, a set of objectives that each country should reach by 2015 to reduce global poverty.
The regions finding it hardest to advance in the Millennium Development Goals, shows the study, were also those in which the investment in agricultural products remained stable or dropped over the last 30 years. The study shows, for example, that governments that invested the equivalent to US$ 700 per labourer in agriculture between 2005 and 2007 had less than 5% of their population starving. In those nations, in turn, that invested less than US$ 100 per worker in agriculture, over 25% of the population was undernourished.
Other measures
The FAO report warns that in many poor and middle income countries incentives for farmers to invest in crops are shy. That is due, in many cases, to countries not guaranteeing the right to property, suffering with lack of legislation in the sector, having high levels of corruption, arbitrary trade practices, high tax burden, deficient governance, bad infrastructure and deficient access to public services. The study concludes that these barriers end up distancing investment in areas that should attract them.
The FAO calls for “better use of limited public funds” in areas that may grow and help reduce poverty, like promotion of research, development, establishment of rural infrastructure and education. It also shows that investing in these sectors may bring more benefits than agricultural subsidies.
“The key word is good governance. We need to assure that the investments meet a certain set of conditions that assure that they contribute to food security and sustainable local development,” said the secretary general at the FAO, José Graziano da Silva, on presenting the report.
*Translated by Mark Ament
